Gentoo has been accepted for its 6th consecutive year in the Google Summer of Code! GSoC pays college students $5000 to work full-time on an open-source project for a summer. Check out our GSoC 2011 homepage if you are interested in this year's GSoC for Gentoo. We particularly encourage applications from students who are new to Gentoo development—many of our students become Gentoo developers after a successful summer.

Interested students can browse Gentoo's project ideas. Student applications are now open, and they'll be accepted until 1900 UTC on April 8. That's just over a week away, so don't delay; get in touch with us now if you want to apply.

Wasn't sure where to respond to apply, so I'm just doing it hear. Anyway, I'm interested in the "Web interface for submitting Documentation changes" project idea. I have experience with web programming and am quick to pick up new languages so I ought to be able to make changes to ease the learning curve for newer Gentoo contributors.

Also, I've noticed that there is a huge lack of accessibility support for those with disabilities, especially in the lower levels of the OS, but also in the various desktop environments. In fact I don't know of any OS that really addresses the special needs of those with disabilities. Among other things: it is difficult to make a system easier to see for those with poor eyesight. One solution would be to have a standard for all applications (or at least all GNOME/KDE applications) that respects a scale parameter. Of course there already exist things like the font selector in the Appearance settings for GNOME, but it is of somewhat poor design as one does not have the choice to make all the fonts larger at the same time. What's more, one would require assistance in order to even be able to get to those settings in the first place, depending on one's vision. And often times the changes in font size conflict with screen space, particularly on smaller screens.

I realize a lot of this might be outside the scope of Gentoo, but other distros have led development on major projects :cough: ubuntu :cough: and I believe accessibility improvements would vastly increase the value of Gentoo and availability of digital freedom. As far as things that Gentoo could implement short of major changes to desktop environments, these would be things like making the install CD possible to use for those with hearing or vision problems. For instance, an interface that takes advantage of the largescale use of microphones and speakers by using a voice-based interface could be of great import.